When people ask us about remote work, we tell them our team and I make sure every employee has the tools, resources, and solutions to be as productive, creative, and secure as possible, working from any location and on any device. Below, I’ve identified some of the top ways we are enabling remote work at IT Partner. I hope you find them useful.
It all starts with managing identities. Whether they are an employee, partner, or supplier, every user who needs to access the corporate network should receive a primary account synced to Azure Active Directory (Azure AD). To enable a single user identity for authentication and offer a unified experience, you may integrate on-premises Windows Server Active Directory with Azure Active Directory (Azure AD).
MFA is required. When a user connects remotely using their work credentials on a device that you manage (more below about that), MFA is almost transparent.
With Microsoft Cloud solutions you can manage a wide range of devices, including Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android. With more employees working remotely and across devices, it's important to support bring-your-own-device (BYOD) scenarios. Microsoft offers self-service enrollment so users can quickly and easily join Azure AD and access company resources.
With this foundation in place, we are driving our employees to work in the cloud. Microsoft 365 enables users to access resources and share files with Office apps across the web, mobile, and desktop, storing their content in the cloud by default. Outlook mobile, Microsoft Teams, and OneDrive are deployed on all corporate devices so people can access their emails, calendars, and files within File Explorer on Windows, Finder on Mac, and Office Apps on mobile devices. We can make it easy for users to save their files to OneDrive the same way they traditionally saved files to their C: drive; this has been key to getting files to the cloud. Users are also now able to do real-time coauthoring and commenting on documents in the cloud, which has proved extremely useful for a distributed workforce.
Microsoft Teams is key for chat, meetings, calls, and collaboration. Now that we find ourselves working remotely, we've been able to stay productive because we are accustomed to a digital workspace. Every meeting is now a Teams meeting, often with video. We can use features like background blur to block out our naughty kids, our barking dogs, and our mismatched furniture. As we rally to help our customers prepare for remote work, we've found that the ability to record meetings has become essential. All attendees can access recordings of meetings they've missed and then listen in to the most relevant parts.
With the increased load and usage from so many people working remotely, service monitoring has proven crucial to making sure everything is operating as it should. Office 365 and Microsoft 365 carefully monitor application and network performance.
Enabling a team to work remotely is an ongoing challenge, and we get that this challenge is different for every organization.
2020-03-19